In the company of women

Tim Lott: 'I had the good fortune to have my first child in 1993, at the beginning of a golden period of American children’s TV.' Photograph: Linda Nylind for the Guardian

I recently wrote a column stating that I believed my brain had been rotted by 18 years of being exposed to kiddie culture – Barbie dolls, puppet shows, shit movies with talking animals etc. But, as with so many of my opinions, it has recently occurred to me that I was wrong.

I have misremembered all the cultural gems I would have missed out on had I not had children. I think I've had more pleasure out of kiddie culture – particularly books and films – than reading all manner of literary novels and art-house movies.

The main scapegoat for the deleterious effects of kiddie culture is usually American kids' TV shows. This is what is fingered by parents as brain rot, contrasted with our supposedly more wholesome, homegrown produce.

But when people think of American cartoons, they still tend to think of low-grade, poor-quality conveyor-belt material that the adults of today grew up with – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Transformers, for instance. But now the summer holidays are in full swing and TV is a necessary prop to see you through, I am reminded daily of how startlingly good American children's programming is.

I had the good fortune to have my first child in 1993, right at the beginning of an unacknowledged golden period of American children's TV. Groundbreaking new series such as Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Rugrats, The Ren & Stimpy Show and the Animaniacs changed the game for American cartoons. In contrast with their 80s predecessors – the awful Scooby-Doo' (still, incomprehensibly, remembered fondly), The Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks – these programmes were ironic, multi-layered and dark.

Ren & Stimpy cartoons were frequently censored for being too violent and deranged. Animaniacs, an updating of the old Warner Brothers cartoons (the main characters, Wacko and Jacko, were meant to be the original Warner Brothers, along with their lesser known sister, Dot), threw in so many cross-cultural references as such a speed it was hard to keep up in between laughing. Rugrats was a dry sitcom set among children, and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, a precursor of the Monsters Inc film, was just plain weird – and genuinely creepy.

I spent countless hours glued to the TV in those days and I'd never had so much fun. It all went a bit belly up towards the end of the decade, when The Powerpuff Girls, Pokémon and various low-grade Japanese anime cartoons began to crowd the airwaves, but, by the time my two youngest were born, in 2003 and 2006, the Americans were back with a vengeance – most notably with the awesome SpongeBob SquarePants, Futurama, and Phineas and Ferb (surely the best performance ever from a cartoon platypus). Weirdest of all was the operatic Wonder Pets! about a hamster, a terrapin and a duck who save pets in peril in a flying boat while communicating entirely in sung verse.

The first time I saw it I thought it was deranged crap. The next time, I realised it was genius. Certainly the libretto from Wee-Wee, Pee-Pee, Tinkle!, about a puppy who is stuck in a house when he needs to relieve himself, is up there, for my money, with Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. "Dogs do it / Fwogs do it / Even muddy oinking hogs do it / Sooner or later every one has to go / wee-wee, pee-pee, tinkle."

All this revolution was kicked off, of course, by the genius of The Simpsons in 1989, still the favourite cartoon of all my children. Nowadays the Brits have Horrible Histories, Charlie and Lola and much else to be proud of. But don't diss the Yanks. Childhood – and parenthood – would be immensely impoverished without them.